The rise of storage process automation - Backup/Restore

Computer Technology Review, Sept, 2003 by Tad Lebeck

Storage process automation is emerging at the top of the industry pundit agenda, replacing storage resource management (SRM) as the "next big thing" in storage trends, in part, their enthusiasm for automation is the storage industry's response to the broader IT industry initiative (vision) for on-demand or utility computing. And, in part, it is a natural vendor migration as the market for SRM tools becomes increasingly crowded and commoditized.

You've also heating more about storage process automation with the avalanche of regulatory compliance statutes, such as SEC Rule 17a-4, HIPAA, 21CFR Part 11 and Sarbanes-Oxley. Before you regard it as mere hype, however, realize that automation is already being deployed in IT shops today, as IT managers recognize and take advantage of its practical benefits. They understand that while classical monitoring, discovery and planning disciplines are an important part of a storage management framework, real savings are primarily generated through efficient, compliant operations.

Compliance has always been one of management's top IT priorities. It's true across increasingly regulated industries like financial services or health care, or in unregulated environments where companies continually work to improve operational practices/efficiencies. Storage process automation is designed to optimize asset utilization and productivity by consistently executing information storage operations in line with prescribed best practices. Because, at its core, achieving compliance is more about how your IT operations are performed than it is about whether service-level goals are met.

There are many benchmarks offered for achieving compliance. Four main themes, however, are consistently referenced in discussions concerning the test for compliance:

* Do I have well-documented policies and procedures (practices) for storage operations?

* Can I demonstrate an operational methodology for enforcing these practices?

* Are these consistently applied across the enterprise?

* Can I and do I audit?

Most companies today either have or are attempting to address the issue of documented practices. While it's a necessary step, it's not enough. In fact, the only thing good documentation certifies about a process is that it's defined and documented. In no way does it ensure you're doing the right thing. The hard part comes in consistently performing and enforcing the tasks needed to ensure compliance.

For example, the CIO of a West Coast financial services company recently told me that his team spent several months documenting operational practices for provisioning capacity and data protection services to his customer-facing applications. But two months after the system was implemented, he discovered during a checkpoint review that few, if any, of the processes were actually being followed. More disturbing was the level of surprise from his operations team that a follow-up audit would be performed. He learned the hard way that without management commitment driving the implementation of compliance throughout the organization, documentation achieves virtually nothing. Even when that commitment is present, it is still difficult to certify policy conformance across complex operations without help. In a mid- to large-scale storage environment, process automation can provide that help, consistently implementing and enforcing the rules.

Information storage operations can involve complex or repetitive user tasks and system processes--in workflows that migrate across multiple platforms. They can easily involve stall" in different administrative organizations, locations and shills. Storage process automation can capture and encapsulate these operations in software as a "canned" process to be used (and reused) by authorized administrators. This creates a defined management model, ensuring that all local and remote tasks within a given process are executed in a consistent fashion--according to specified policy.

Today, storage process automation is typically equated with capacity provisioning and positioned as a natural extension of SRM. In this limited arena, automation can deliver (through policy compliance) substantial improvements in storage utilization and staff productivity. But process automation has an even greater potential impact when applied outside the SRM domain; it can perform and audit execution of data movement, protection and recovery operations, providing the framework to certify that critical data is where it is supposed to be, and that it can be recovered according to defined timetables.

This view was confirmed by a survey of storage managers, conducted at the spring Storage Management conference. They said their top five challenges were (in order): Backup verification, database cloning/snapshot, data migration, low storage utilization and reclamation of space. Think about it: all of these responses involve related processes, and each can benefit greatly from the labor savings and policy compliance provided by storage process automation. While capacity provisioning plays an integral role in some cases, in others it may play no role at all. So, it becomes crucial to think of automation as a technology that can address each of these operational tasks and also as a framework to weave them together, where needed, in an end-to-end process.